


let your hair down while you still can

by hedgebitch



Category: Red Hood and the Outlaws (Comics)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Foster Family, Alternate Universe - No Powers, Fluff, Gen, Generation Outlaw, Hair Dye, High School
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-21
Updated: 2020-06-21
Packaged: 2021-03-04 01:15:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,677
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24835213
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hedgebitch/pseuds/hedgebitch
Summary: Somewhere deep down, Jason knows that a trip to the local beauty supply store is not the correct response to his daughter getting sent to the principal’s office in the middle of the school day. But Artemis is at work and she’s, like, 95% of his impulse control.
Relationships: Artemis of Bana-Mighdall & Jason Todd (mentioned), Cloud 9 & Jason Todd
Comments: 2
Kudos: 58





	let your hair down while you still can

**Author's Note:**

> title from my hair by the maine.
> 
> tw: minor references to past child abuse/neglect
> 
> s/o to @[redhoodiejt](https://redhoodiejt.tumblr.com) and @[what-if-i-imagine](https://what-if-i-imagine.tumblr.com) on tumblr for helping me out with this!

Jason gets the call from Bristol High during his lunch break. 

Well. Best to put air quotes around “lunch break” considering he works from home, and today’s lunch consists of leftover curry spooned into a whole wheat tortilla in some failed facsimile of a burrito. 

Could be worse, though. Last Friday, he’d made the mistake of making the kids’ lunches before drinking coffee and subsequently ended up with two fluffernutter sandwiches for Clara—which of course had translated into one fluffernutter sandwich for Clara and one fluffernutter sandwich for Jason. Art came home for lunch just to get photographic evidence. 

He sets the uneaten half of his—whatever it is—down to quickly grab for the phone. The only people who ever call the house phone are social workers or school employees, and Jason prefers to keep neither waiting. 

The voice on the other end is somehow excessively enthused and completely vacant as it drolls through a “Hi, is Mr. or Mrs. Wayne available?”

“This is Jason Wayne,” Jason responds, not bothering to correct the guy re: Art’s name and marital status. If he’s already not bothering to read the file that’s gotta be open in front of him, there’s not a chance in hell of him caring. 

“Oh, good, I’m glad I caught you,” the receptionist replies, sounding totally super glad and everything. “Clara was involved in an incident with another student. Would it be possible for you or another guardian to come in and pick her up?”

“What kind of incident?” Jason asks, already reaching for the keys to the Honda. 

The receptionist assures him it was “a minor altercation” which is the exact opposite of reassuring because no one should be _altercating_ with Jason’s kid, minorly or otherwise. 

He shoots a quick text to Artemis before hopping in the car—‘C getting sent home early. Non emergency’—but considering the complaints he’s heard about her workload this week, he isn’t expecting a reply anytime soon.

When he gets to the school, he shows an ID and signs in at the front desk before being led back to the hall outside the principal’s office. Never a great sign.

Clara, already seated at one of the blue plastic chairs by the door, avoids eye contact with Jason while they wait for the principal to finish speaking with the—altercator? altercatee?—and their guardian.

“You okay?” he asks her, giving her a quick once-over for any blood or bruises.

She nods, then stares right back down at her light blue birks. Her eyeliner is starting to run in the corners, and he wants to offer her a hug, but he can remember waiting on a similarly uncomfortable seat, desperately hoping Bruce wouldn’t take back his support upon hearing who exactly started the fight. 

Inside the principal’s office, the other guy—Andrea Martinez, it turns out, not that that means anything to Jason, ‘cause Clara’s never mentioned her before—is looking a little worse for the wear. She’s tearing up, too, pressing a reddened paper towel to her ear, and showing a bit more scalp than is probably normal. 

Clara avoids looking anywhere near Andrea’s face, and jesus fuck, Jason’s praying she didn’t tear this chick’s earring out. 

Like, good on her for catching that weakness but. Gross. 

“I don’t care what my daughter said to her,” Ms. Martinez insists, once the principal and guidance counselor have led them through a reenactment/summary of what transpired during the girls’ lunch period. 

Jason means to listen respectfully, but he hears the phrase “charity case” come out of her mouth and sees white. He swallows back the anger that floods him in favour of putting the degree he paid good money for to some fucking use instead of just verbally—or physically—tearing this bitch a new one. 

Art’s better at this diplomatic-type stuff, but just cause it don’t come easy to him don’t mean it don’t come. He knows his priorities; he knows his limits. 

“My daughter,” he says, clearly and sharply, falling into an accent that sounds more like Bruce than Jason, but making sure Clara hears him all the same, “deserves the same access to education that yours does. Clara definitely reacted impulsively, which I’m sure she’ll apologize to Andrea for shortly, but quite frankly, calling for Clara’s expulsion isn’t going to prevent your child from getting punched by the next kid she tries to bully.”

Jason lets Clara stew in silence all the way up until they reach the car in the parking lot. 

“Okay,” he tells her. “If you don’t want to talk about it, that’s okay, we can talk later—but I feel like I should remind you that we’re about to be trapped in silence in an enclosed space for twenty minutes.”

“I’ll talk,” Clara mumbles, then tugs impatiently on the passenger door handle. 

In the safety of the car, Jason grabs a tissue pack from the center console and reaches across to hand it to Clara. 

“She didn’t just call you ugly, did she?” he asks as she dabs at her smudged eyeliner, because it’s the one question he already knows the answer to. Clara had locked up while answering the counselor’s leading questions, and while it’s true that her BPD makes her prone to mood swings, Caden had called her way worse when he first moved in and never managed to strike this particular nerve. 

“We had a sub in English,” she says, catching Jason off guard with the non sequitur. 

“He called on me to read some, it didn’t go great, whatever, but then in lunch, I’m in that longass line for food, and I can hear her talking shit about me a few people up. And, and I guess I was already upset, so her calling me stupid was like. The straw or whatever, so I walked up to her and I was just gonna like, tell her to shut up or something, I swear! And all I did was say like, listen, if you’ve got something to say, say it to my fucking face, yeah?”

Jason nods when she pauses to sniffle, because, well, yeah.

“And that’s when she said that shit about my hair and I was just so, so mad, and I slapped her, and she pushed me back and she had these huge, godawful earrings in, like, they totally clashed with her undertones, and the last rational thought I had was just like. And this bitch is calling me ugly? And, uh.”

“And you went for it,” Jason finishes, trying very hard not to laugh, and then not having to try at all when he glances over at the passenger seat and realizes Clara has burst into silent sobs. 

“Hey. Clara. Clare-bear,” Jason tests, trying to gauge whether these are tears over the whole situation or over a fresh new twist he has yet to predict. 

“Don’t you _dare_ ,” Clara threatens, so he figures it’s safe to go on. 

“Look, I’m about to verge into bad parent territory, so don’t tattle. But I’m proud of you.”

The incredulous “uh huh?” that comes out of Clara’s mouth doesn’t match up a bit with the eyeliner and mascara tear tracks running down her cheeks. 

“No, honest,” he tells her. “I would _not_ have stopped at one ear.”

Clara’s heard enough stories about Jason’s childhood to know he’s telling the truth, but she laughs anyway, because, well. It’s still kind of funny, Jason figures.

“I mean, don’t get me wrong, there’s definitely a ‘not mad, just disappointed’ talk in your future, and Artemis is probably not gonna agree with me on the ‘could’ve been worse’ thing, and Dr. Veritas will definitely be hearing about this…but…you stopped yourself, you recognized what emotions led you to act, you apologized—that’s a lot of progress, Clara.”

“And they won’t suspend me?” Clara asks, as if she had left the office with the Martinezes without hearing the verdict for herself.

“And they’re not going to suspend you,” Jason confirms for her, “because this is covered in your 504. But even if it weren’t, and even if you had publicly performed a tracheotomy on her with a spork, I would still be proud of you, because you’re my kid, permanently, and I picked you and I love you. Burgers or tacos?”

“What?” Clara says, looking out the window as she somehow just now realizes he hasn’t been driving them home.

“Unless there’s a secret cafeteria in the principal’s office, I’m pretty sure I’m responsible for feeding you lunch—no, stop scrubbing at your face, we can just do the drive through, just don’t tell Dee or Caden I let you eat in the car.”

There’s an outlet mall behind the Taco Bell drive through, so Jason parks for them to eat. 

Clara makes it through half her fish tacos—gross—before stopping and blurting out, “She didn’t just say my hair was ugly.”

“Oh?” Jason asks, because there’s not much else he can do.

Clara makes eye contact with her remaining taco while she answers.

“I don’t…I don’t remember exactly what she said, I was so mad, but it was. It was something about how. How everyone would always be able to tell my real parents didn’t want me.” 

Jason frowns. “I…like, reproductive incompatibility aside, Artemis is a redhead? I’m blond? I only got an A+ in every biology class I’ve ever taken, but I’m pretty sure you’re genetically entirely possible.”

Clara forgets her—he’s not being dismissive by calling it teen angst, it’s just, she’s a teen, and she’s angst-ing—immediately.

“You’re what??”

She reaches across the center console and grabs at his head despite his complaints of “don’t put your fish hands in my hair” and “you’re an evil, evil child.”

“Oh my god,” she declares gleefully. “Your roots are _awful_ , how haven’t I noticed this before?”

“Wait, fuck, are they?” He pulls down the visor to check in the mirror. “Shit, they are.”

“Field trip?” Clara asks, and Jason follows her line of sight to the Sally’s across the lot.

“Artemis is going to kill me,” Jason says as he sets the reusable grocery bag full of dye and bleach and a lipstick Clara had given him puppy dog eyes over onto the kitchen island, taking a quick detour to erase all evidence of his half-assed lunch.

“Dee said they were staying late for bio club, right? So we’ve got…til 4:30?”

“Nah,” Jason says, grabbing the bag and pushing her towards the stairs. “We gotta be done by 4 so I can get back to the school in time to pick them up. Is your hair clean?” 

When Clara nods, he sends her off to her room to get a t-shirt and starts setting up in the hall bathroom—Art will undoubtedly kill him twice if he gets dye on the white bath mat in the master bathroom.

“Walk me through the steps here—why are we bleaching my hair if it’s already blonde?” Clara asks as he starts on the bleach.

“Do you remember learning about colour theory in…middle school, or elementary school maybe?” Jason asks, although he’s pretty sure the answer is “my foster family at the time didn’t care if I went to school or not” because they’d gotten the same answer when asking her social worker how the hell she’d never been diagnosed with dyslexia when she first entered the system.

“I don’t know,” Clara says, which probably means “no.”

“Okay. What happens if you blend blue eyeshadow into a yellow base?”

“Ohhh,” Clara says, and then, with distaste, “ _green_.”

“Yup. So, we’re using the bleach to strip out the yellow pigment so that when the blue goes in, it doesn’t blend with anything.

“Please don’t burn my hair off.”

Jason pokes her with the end of the brush not currently covered in chemicals. “You couldn’t have expressed that concern before I was halfway done?”

Her hair _is_ pretty light, so he doesn’t let her sit long before washing the bleach out in the sink.

“I look like that Harry Potter guy,” she says when she catches a glimpse of her platinum hair in the mirror, and Jason resists the urge to ask her if she means Malfoy—she had tried to read the books, back when she first came to live with them, and her frustration had been palpable. He’d ended up explaining that he kept his copies around more for the nostalgia factor than any actual quality, and if she wanted they could rent the movies on demand for movie night.

“You’re a much nicer client,” he tells her instead. “Now put some vaseline around your hairline unless you want to look like Avatar.”

“Okay, boomer,” Clara says, rather than ask what Avatar is, and complies.

Jason takes his time with the dye—Clara’s hair is deceptively thick, and he doesn’t want it turning out patchy. 

“You said ‘or Caden’ earlier,” Clara comments while Jason moves on to the next section. Because of course she noticed that.

“I sure did, didn’t I,” he opts for, waiting to see what exactly about the slip up stuck with her. 

Clara hums, waits a moment, then starts up again. “I guess—I never really thought about it, even though the social workers and everyone always bring it up. ‘Cause the other families I was placed with, they didn’t really—well, y’know. They didn’t like me that much. So I didn’t think about how foster parents would end up missing kids.”

Jason flips over to the next section of hair. 

“In the training sessions we go to, and the groups with other foster parents, there’s this phrasing that pops up a lot—‘We’re happy for you and sad for us,’ or something along those lines. And it’s a gross oversimplification of a lot of complex stuff, but, it’s also probably pretty close to how it feels.”

“I wanted him to stay,” Clara confesses, after a moment’s hesitation.

“He’s a good kid,” Jason says, because admitting that a part of him did, too, would be counterproductive. 

“Well, I wouldn’t go _that_ far,” she replies, twisting all the way around to eye a hole in the drywall, located at approximately the fist height of an eight year old, and narrowly avoiding a faceful of dye for her trouble.

“Nah, he is. And his parents are good people, too—they just needed a little help.”

“And what happens when they need help again?” Clara asks bitterly, and that’s a question Jason doesn’t have any good answers for, not when the root of the question has nothing to do with Caden’s parents and everything to do with mothers like Clara’s, with fathers like Jason’s.

“Maybe there are some people beyond help,” he contends—because it’s what he believes to be true. 

“But that doesn’t mean we stop helping,” Clara quotes back to him—because he tells her what he wishes he could believe.

“Okay,” Jason says, double checking the last section of hair. “Forty-five minutes, then rinse.”

It’s 3:50 by the time Clara finishes washing all the dye out, so he has to guess based on how it looks wet, but he’s pretty sure it’s gonna look fucking great dry.

“There, see, now _that’s_ genetically impossible,” Jason tells her as she looks it over in the mirror.

Clara sends a longing glance in the general direction of the hair dryer, so Jason grabs it and unplugs it before she can even ask.

“New house rule: no frying your hair off while I’m gone,” he informs her, and she sticks out her tongue. “Alright, I gotta run and get Dee, but Artemis shouldn’t be home til six, so we’ll have plenty of time to do a photoshoot before she gets back and grounds  _me_ for dying your hair instead of grounding you.” 

Clara blinks as if she’s just remembered the capital c Circumstances that brought her to this point. 

“Oh jeez, you totally just did that. Has anyone ever told you you’re a terrible parent?”

**Author's Note:**

> these funky little evil bastards are the only reason i'm even still reading rhato so i figured it was high time i wrote something abt one of 'em.
> 
> a quick comment regarding the us foster care system: this is not something i've personally experienced. if i've gotten something wrong in a way that could be at all harmful, please let me know. jason has some opinions i do not share; i kept his expression of them to a minimum bc i wanted this to be short and ultimately positive and tbh the "rehabilitation is impossible" red hood outlook doesn't lend itself well to this au.
> 
> if you liked this or hated it and want to yell at me, feel free to find me on tumblr @[nightflings](https://nightflings.tumblr.com)


End file.
